10 Essential Questions to Ask Before Hiring an Amazon Advertising Agency

When evaluating an Amazon agency to handle your PPC campaigns, it’s crucial to ask the right questions to ensure they can deliver results, manage your budget effectively, and align with your growth goals.

Here are the biggest and most important questions you should ask:

1. What’s Your Experience Managing Amazon PPC for Brands Like Mine?

• Why It Matters: You want to ensure the agency has experience in your specific industry or product category. This ensures they understand the competitive landscape, target audience, and nuances of your niche.

• Follow-up: Can you share case studies or success stories with similar brands?

2. How Do You Structure and Optimise PPC Campaigns?

• Why It Matters: Understanding their strategy for structuring campaigns (auto vs. manual, product-focused, keyword targeting, etc.) will give you insight into how they’ll manage your account. Are they going to test different campaign types or go all-in with one strategy?

• Follow-up: How often will you optimize my campaigns, and what metrics will you track?

3. What’s Your Approach to Keyword Research and Targeting?

• Why It Matters: The effectiveness of Amazon PPC hinges on identifying and targeting the right keywords. You need to ensure they have a solid strategy for keyword research, both for ranking and conversion.

• Follow-up: How do you choose between broad, phrase, and exact match keywords in different scenarios?

4. How Do You Maximize Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)?

• Why It Matters: ROAS is one of the most important metrics for any Amazon PPC campaign. Their ability to balance ad spend with profitable returns will determine how efficiently your campaigns are run.

• Follow-up: What steps do you take when campaigns aren’t hitting ROAS targets?

5. What Tools Do You Use to Manage and Optimize Campaigns?

• Why It Matters: The tools and technologies they use for bid management, keyword research, and reporting are key to their efficiency. An agency using top-tier tools is likely to perform better in campaign optimization and data analysis.

• Follow-up: How do you leverage automation vs. manual optimizations?

6. How Will You Manage My Budget to Ensure Cost-Efficiency?

• Why It Matters: You need an agency that will maximize your PPC budget by avoiding wasteful spending on ineffective keywords, while ensuring high-performing campaigns get the attention they deserve.

• Follow-up: How do you prevent overspending on low-performing keywords or irrelevant traffic?

7. What Metrics Do You Report on and How Often?

• Why It Matters: Regular, detailed reporting will help you understand whether the campaigns are working and where adjustments are needed. Ask for transparency on metrics such as ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sales), ROAS, impressions, and conversion rates.

• Follow-up: How often will I receive reports, and what format do you provide them in?

8. How Do You Approach A/B Testing in PPC Campaigns?

• Why It Matters: A/B testing is crucial for optimizing ad performance. You need to know how often they run tests and what they prioritize (ad copy, keywords, product targeting, etc.).

• Follow-up: Can you share examples of successful tests that improved campaign performance?

9. How Do You Handle Seasonality and Market Fluctuations?

• Why It Matters: Sales and ad performance can vary significantly based on seasonality or market trends. You want an agency that knows how to adjust bids, budgets, and targeting based on these fluctuations to capitalize on opportunities and minimize waste.

• Follow-up: What’s your strategy for major sales events like Prime Day, Black Friday, or Cyber Monday?

10. How Will You Help Me Scale My PPC Campaigns as I Grow?

• Why It Matters: As your business grows, you’ll need to scale PPC efforts to keep up with demand. You want to know how the agency plans to evolve your campaigns as your goals change.

• Follow-up: What’s your approach to scaling while maintaining profitability?

11. What’s Your Strategy for Sponsored Brand and Display Ads?

• Why It Matters: PPC isn’t just about Sponsored Products; Sponsored Brand and Sponsored Display Ads can play a crucial role in brand visibility. Understanding their approach to these formats helps you know whether they can handle more complex ad strategies.

• Follow-up: How do you decide when and how to implement Sponsored Brand or Display Ads?

12. How Do You Keep Up with Amazon’s Algorithm and Policy Changes?

• Why It Matters: Amazon frequently updates its algorithms and policies, which can directly impact ad performance. You want an agency that stays informed and adapts quickly to changes.

• Follow-up: How do you handle unexpected changes or disruptions to PPC campaigns?

13. What Role Does Organic Ranking Play in Your PPC Strategy?

• Why It Matters: A smart PPC strategy doesn’t work in isolation but helps boost organic rankings over time. You want to know if the agency has a holistic view of both paid and organic growth.

• Follow-up: How do you balance paid and organic strategies to optimize overall growth?

14. How Do You Optimise Campaigns for New Product Launches?

• Why It Matters: Product launches require a specific PPC strategy to gain visibility fast. The agency should have a strong approach to quickly building momentum for new products.

• Follow-up: Can you walk me through your process for driving early sales during a product launch?

15. How Do You Approach Negative Keywords and Budget Efficiency?

• Why It Matters: Effective negative keyword management is key to eliminating wasteful spending on irrelevant search terms. You need to know their process for regularly identifying and applying negative keywords.

• Follow-up: How frequently do you audit negative keywords, and how do you decide what to exclude?

At ZEAL Agency LTD we have managed millions of pounds of advertising spend across Amazon, Google and Meta. Get in touch to learn more